Welcome to our blog! Our little family consists of Meryem (38), husband Arthur (40), Femke (3 years) and baby Lente. We live in Cairo, Egypt since mid September 2009.
VillaJanse refers to our house we built in the countryside of Urla, near Izmir in Turkey. We lived in Turkey for 6,5 years before moving to Egypt.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

We're back from our holidays. As we are quite nearby Asia, we managed to arrange a two week holiday in Sri Lanka on short term. Perfect! Very green country, good food and sweet people. So a good holiday with five days at the beach, two sight seeing in capital Colombo and one in fisherman’s town Negombo.

Quite some travelling, but Sri Lanka is not a huge country and the greener parts are even smaller. Also the infrastructure is quite good, so we managed to hop around by train or bus quite easily.

Unfortunately we could not handle the hills of Ela anymore. This as Femke gave the impression that she could handle 3,5 hours by car / bus /train, but no more!. And as Ella was a 5,5 hours drive (and from there another 8! to the South!), we agreed to leave this for our pension days ;)

We went to Unawatuna for our beach time, about 15 min from Galle, a town with many Dutch influences...

Colombo was a bit disappointing as it has been never developed due to the war, but we did see some nice temples and the war memorial is worth visiting. Also the bazaar with small shops is always a treat. Also we spent time with an elephant, always time well spent if you’re hopping along with Femke J

Negombo is a charming fisherman town, very authentic without high buildings.

The 3,5 hour train ride to Kandy was stunning, slowly we went further up the green mountains. Kandy is the Sri Lanka capital of old. By train we clutched along the mountains and small railway stations. As we were in the back of the train, the wagon jerked so many times that Mer’s water almost broke ;) But Kandy was absolutely worth it, very green, very charming. .In Kandy we decided to hire a car with driver for a whole day of sight seeing. We went to a tea factory, a herbal garden and made an elephant ride... Femke is still talking about that! In the centre there is a beautiful, large botanic garden, really amazing what trees and plants they had collected there in a period of hundred years..And the tea factory… well, we certainly asked our questions there. As an interesting fact; the process of making the tea only differs between green (mainly; not fermented) and brown (fermented, so stronger) tea. The taste differs mainly with the blend of spices you add.

Check out our 'best of Sri Lanka' by clicking on the presentation link below: